Chances are that there’s a Curves facility near you. In case you’re not acquainted with this business, it is a chain of exercise facilities that offers a workout circuit requiring about 30 minutes. Drop in several times a week and you can have the body you’ve always dreamed about. Placing the prospect of change in shape, which is so difficult and so important to many people, within easy reach has enabled these facilities to multiply like rabbits. It seems that now there is one in every shopping center.
Change is big business because change is necessary, important, and difficult.
It is necessary because none of us has arrived. We all have those areas that are not what they should be. We all need to change in order to become the person God designed this to be.
Change is important because failure to change produces disastrous consequence. Failure to change one’s diet can produce clogged arteries and ultimately open-heart surgery or a stroke. Failure to deal with one’s anger problem can result in shameful and destructive behavior and ultimately divorce. Change is also important because it represents the doorway to many rich and beautiful dimensions of life. Life is substantially better if we learn to control our diet or our anger. We feel better, we look better, we have better relationships.
But, as we noted in the previous post, change comes hard, especially in those stubborn areas. It can be so hard that we have given up in some areas, reconciling ourselves to the view that we will never be different. Yet, as noted above, in light of what is at stake, giving up is not an option. Therefore, we find ourselves trying again, taking a different approach, reading a new book, seeing another commercial, and hoping that this time it will work—this approach will be effective.
Because change is necessary, important, and hard, the change industry is huge. The health club and physical fitness aspect represents only one small corner. There are the ubiquitous diet programs. There are programs and containers designed to enable you to change from chaos to order. There are organizations that promise to transform your financial irresponsibility to discipline and wealth.
However, the two biggest segments of the change industry in our society are the church and psychology. The main thrust of both is transformation. They both offer the individual the capacity to overcome destructive approaches to life and replace them with productive ones. Education might be considered another major change institution, but its endeavors to transform the character and personality of students is largely guided by psychology.
Therefore, we might view the church, especially the evangelical church, and psychology as competing institutions in the change industry. Especially the evangelical church because more liberal churches have abandoned supernatural means of change, and like education, now look to psychology for help with change.
Since how to change is one of the major questions of life, and evangelical Christian and psychology provide the two primary competing approaches to change, it becomes important to determine which to look to in our efforts to deal with emotional, behavioral, and relational problems. That is the issue we plan to address in the days ahead.